In recent years, individuals and business have increasingly turned to mobile computing devices to interact with others. For example, individuals routinely utilize mobile computing devices to send and receive electronic communications, create and coordinate digital calendaring events, or facilitate payment transactions.
Although computing devices and corresponding digital systems allow users to interact in a variety of ways, conventional digital systems still have a variety of problems. For example, in order to interact with others, many conventional digital systems require users to first identify and/or digitally connect with a third party. For instance, in order to send a digital message or payment to another individual, conventional digital systems require a user to somehow identify information corresponding to the other individual. This typically involves asking for, and manually entering, identifying information (e.g., a phone number, e-mail address, or bank account information) or searching through a list of users provided by the digital system.
Users often express frustration with such conventional digital systems. Indeed, the process of searching for, or otherwise trying to obtain, an identifier corresponding to other users of a digital system often requires an extensive amount of time and leads to user frustration. For example, upon meeting a new person, users often express frustration with the process of exchanging and manually entering personal information into mobile devices. Similarly, although some conventional digital systems provide searching user lists, identifying other parties utilizing such lists is often unreliable (e.g., users often incorrectly select a different user with a similar name) and inconvenient (e.g., users often take a significant amount of time to identify the correct user). One will appreciate that such problems are exacerbated when searching among millions or billions of users many with the same or similar names or other identifying information.